SO MUCH TO DO, SO LITTLE TIME

Hope you enjoyed meeting our new friends in the last blogs? We have enjoyed every one of them and more. A few of our friends here want to make it into the blog as well. Two of them are the art students I have lunch with on Mondays and then tutor in English . Their big test was in late June - hope they did well. Renee and I have shared one class. The Freshmen class I had last term she has had this term. It has been good to have these students in common. Many have become friends, especially the boys.

At the beginning of May, Renee went to Nanjing to visit her sister

Melanie. Melanie was in Nanjing because her daughter Lau

rel had given birth to their second child, Victoria Grace. Renee was able to go and visit Chad, Laurel, Melanie, Victoria, and her big brother, William, who is himself just a toddler. What a

great opportunity. Renee got to spend time with Melanie and also hold the baby.

On May 28 was the Dragon Boat Festival. It is celebrated here in China by eating sweet sticky rice wrapped in some sort of greenleaf, not bamboo but like bamboo. We got to eat that, zong zi, several times that day with students and with two families. On our campus, because we

have a lake, they also held dragon boat races. There were 16 boats. The crowds gathered early.

The campus was closed to outsiders, who had to watch from one end of the lake. We could get pretty close to the action and people hooted and cheered. No one seemed to care who won.

Taking part is more important here in China.

We spent the day with friends, and we were able

to feel a part of the Festival. The Festival has

a bit of a strange history. It celebrates a wise civil servant who drowned himself out of sadness for the fate of his kingdom and his inability to help effectively. In the story, the dragon boat

s were sent out to search for his body and people threw zong zi into the lake to feed the fish so they wouldn't feed on him At least, that is one story.

This second semester my secondary project has been to start a men's group. I invited my English Teaching Major boys to meet with me. We met six times this term.

We met and talked about teaching and the role of men in China and America, played ping pong and badminton; watched Rocky and had a good discussion about Phialdelphia, underdogs, and film making, and, of course, we shared a meal together.

The picture is minus Dwayne and Steven, but you can see it was a good group. Renee, not to be outdone, began meeting with a group of girls for lunch on Fridays. The girls come from various backgrounds, but are mostly tied together by Renee's friend Serena. (Rich thinks he is my motivation. Ha!)

Renee and I have both lost weight, but we are not always

sure how that has happened. Many activities these last months have involved eating. 1) Two senior girls visited us and brought the makings for dinner. It was a great meal, and it was interesting to watch them work at prep

aring it for us. 2) Another dumpling adventure took place with our neighbors and friends, Sally and Ji. We spent a morning helping making the dumplings and then shared the feast. The grandmother was the boss

, but we all had our hands in the makings. 3) We have become friends with the local Catholic priest. Wang Fang has said he would visit us and he did. We shared a meal with him and the translator he brought with him f

or fear he would have to speak English. 4) Another group of meals dealt with our class monitors. We both invited them to a dinner. (Now "not to be outdone by Richard did motivate me to eat with my monitors:) We planned our menus, reserved a room, ordered the food, and led a meal. The monitors were suspcious that we could do this, but surprised by our ability to order a good meal and make the arrangeme nts. The night of our dinner, I/Renee was joined by one of our voluntee

r friends from another site. The students definitely enjoyed her beautiful young face.

One last event before the break for summer was a boat outing on our lake. Four of my boys

from HongHe invited us for the outing. On a hot day we boarded a raftlike covered boat and paddled our way around the lake. It was good to get another view of the beautiful campus and fun to share the ride and then dinner with the boys.

Excitement on the ride was provided by another student who was fishing along the lake. When he saw us he stripped down to his underwear and swam out to us. No swimming allowed, of course, but that only added to the excitement. A great time was had by all.

Graduation is a bittersweet time. The term ending, friends leaving. Graduation here means that each department will have a party for its graduates. We were invited to several of these parties P.E., art, music, dance, landscape design. Notice which one were were not invited to? The P.E. celebration provided a formal invitation and a place at the head table with the head teachers. They provided us with flowers as well as all of their teachers. At one of the art celebrations I got to sing "You have a Friend".

I (Renee) had a chance to tutor one of our teacher friends in English for a few weeks. His name is Duan Qiang; he is a vocal teacher and performer. I think I mainly succeeded in encouraging him to open his mo

uth and speak. I don't know that he learned much new info, but he did become more confident. Also, quite by accident, I discovered the efficacy of showing/assigning movies to my classes and

using them as a basis for discussion. When the students have something to talk about, they do much better, especially if they are in a small group. I wanted to help them understand something about the Civil Rights movement in America; I used

The Great Debaters and Remember the Titans, both of which star Denzel Washington. The third movie, on which I based our final exam, was The Miracle Worker, the story of Helen Keller and her teacher, Anne Sullivan. The Chinese students are very sensitive emotionally; that movie wiped them out. Movies are very accessible here online.